Hill’s basic premise (passed on to him by Andrew Carnegie) is this: Focus on your outcome to the exclusion of everything else. Be willing to do anything to achieve your goal. Your craving for the result drives everything you do everyday.

A great example of this is demonstrated by the character of Susan Walker in Miracle on 34th Street*. The 1947 movie featured single career woman Doris Walker and her daughter Susan. Despite Mom’s insistence on indoctrinating Susan into a life of working for the man and accepting her lot, Susan believes things can change-if she wants them to badly enough. Susan prevails, with the help of Kris Kringle, when she draws a picture of herself, her mom and her future stepdad in their dream home a drawing that comes to life.

If your goal doesn’t make you yearn for it-you have the wrong goal.

Take a look at your overall success goal. What is the object of your desire?

Write it down-say it out loud and write down your reaction.

Did you get excited or scared?

Did you smile when you said it or frown?

Did you say it out loud but heard a voice in your heard scoff at ever attaining it?

Did you hear someone else’s voice?

Each successful person has the following 3 characteristics (in descending order of importance):

*a crystal clear goal

* An overwhelming desire matched with a willingness to do anything to achieve that goal

* The talent/knowledge/skills to achieve the goal

Look for coincidence & inspiration. Your subconscious creates these events to keep you moving in the right direction. When you’re on the right path, working with your talents instead of against them, you know what to do. Obstacles appear but you find solutions.

One way to speed up the process is to meditate. Spending quiet, purposeful, contemplative time will let you hear all that you need to know.

Movies make great examples because they’re written to follow a straight line from want to attain with some obstacles thrown in between for dramatic tension. It’s called escapism because the story rarely reflects reality.Forget the movies; make your own happy ending.

I’m either hanging onto a trapeze bar swinging along or, for a few moments in my life, I’m hurtling across space in between trapeze bars.

Most of the time, I spend my life hanging on for dear life to my trapeze-bar-of-the-moment. It carries me along a certain steady rate of swing and I have the feeling that I am in control of my life. I know most of the right questions.

As I swing along I look ahead of me into the distance and what do I see?

I see another trapeze bar swinging toward me.

It is empty, and I know, in that place in me that knows, that this new trapeze bar has my name on it. It is my next step, my growth, my aliveness coming to get me. In my heart-of-hearts I know that for me to grow, I must release my grip on the present, well-known bar and move to the new one.

Each time it happens to me, I hope (no, I pray) that I won’t have to grab the new one. But in my knowing place, I know that I must totally release my grasp on my old bar, and, for some moment in time, I must hurtle across space before I can grab onto the new bar.

Each time I am filled with terror.

But I do it anyway. Perhaps this is the essence of what the mystics call the faith experience.

No guarantees, no net, no insurance policy, but you do it anyway because, somehow, to keep hanging onto that bar is no longer on the list of alternatives. And so, for an eternity that can last a microsecond or a thousand lifetimes, I soar across the dark void. In that space the past is gone and the future is not yet here.

It is called transition.

I have come to believe that it is the only place that real change occurs. I mean, real change, not the pseudo-change that only lasts until the next time my old buttons get punched. I have noticed that in our culture, this transition zone is looked upon as a nothing, a no-place between places.

Sure the old trapeze bar was real, and that new one coming towards me, I hope that’s real too. But the void in between? That’s just a scary, confusing, disorienting nowhere that must be gotten through as fast and as unconsciously as possible. What a waste!

I have a sneaking suspicion that the transition zone is the only real thing and the bars are illusion we dream up to avoid the void, where the real change, the real growth occurs for us.

Whether or not my hunch is true, it remains that the transition zones in our lives are incredibly rich places. They should be honored, even savored. Yes, with all the pain and fear and feelings of being out of control that can (but not necessarily) accompany transitions, they are still the most alive, most growth-filled, passionate, expansive moments in our lives.

And so, transformation of fear may have nothing to do with making fear go away, but rather with giving ourselves permission to hang out in the transition between the trapeze bars.

Transforming our need to grab that new bar-any bar-is allowing ourselves to dwell in the only place where change really happens.

It can be terrifying. It can also be enlightening in the true sense of the word.